Great proportions melt away impurities in a design. So if you have buttons and there’s too much space between them, the space between them is another element that you have to comprehend.
So if you have two buttons, you now have three objects. You’ve got the button, the button, the space. But if things are the right proportions, you just have two items, the two buttons.
And I think over a big screen, if you get the proportions right, you could be eliminating 10 or 20 different extra negative space things and things that you just have to comprehend. So it’s very soothing.

I’m co-creating a new book—The Design Activist’s Handbook—with writer Michelle Taute, which will be published by HOW Books next year. Rather than fill it with case studies, we’re hoping to make this a practical guide to aligning your design career with your beliefs. We’re hoping you might be able to help us provide some inspiring and informative stories for readers. Specifically, we’re looking for: Artwork and interviews: Socially conscious design projects, both self-initiated and client projects, with good stories to go with them. We’d like to hear about failures and successes: –Your first efforts at socially conscious design. –Projects/situations where you struggled with ethics. –How you manage to pursue socially conscious design and still pay the bills. –What socially conscious design means to you. –Situations/projects that helped you discover your power as a designer. Referrals: Know someone else we should talk to? Or something you’d really like to see in the book? Please let us know! We’re especially interested in talking with in-house and agency designers who are working to affect change at their companies from the bottom up.

Toby Ng designed some really fantastic posters titled If The World Were A Village of 100 People. These posters are built on the statistics of the world. I am going to try to post all 20 over the next couple weeks. To view some of the others I have posted use the search option with the 100 Village tag. I first saw this on This is Awesome.

Did you have to manipulate the font in anyway to create a perfect arrow?

Yes, indeed. I was studying Univers 67 (Bold Condensed) and Futura Bold, both wonderful faces. But each had its potential limitations downstream in application to thousands of FedEx media, from waybills and embroidered courier caps to FedEx.com and massive signage for aircraft, buildings and vehicles. Moreover, neither was particularly suited to forcing an arrow into its assigned parking place without torturing the beautifully crafted letterforms of the respective faces. To avoid getting too technical here, suffice it to say I took the best characteristics of both and combined them into unique and proprietary letterforms that included both ligatures (connected letters) and a higher x-height, or increased size of the lower-case letters relative to the capital letters. I worked these features around until the arrow seemed quite natural in shape and location.